About PrintFarmCalc
Quick answer
PrintFarmCalc covers desktop fabrication: benchtop 3D printers and desktop diode and CO2 laser cutters. It does not cover CNC routers, table saws or woodworking, which are a different workshop.
What this site is
PrintFarmCalc is a calculator first reference for desktop fabrication. It covers benchtop 3D printers, both FDM and resin, and desktop laser cutters, both diode and CO2. The calculators came first and everything else exists to support them: the reference tables share their material data, and the buying guides exist because a calculation usually ends in a purchase.
What it is not
It is not a workshop site. CNC routers, table saws, dust collection and woodworking are a different set of machines with different hazards and a different buyer, and they are covered properly elsewhere. Where the two genuinely overlap, which is mostly extraction and material safety, this site writes it from the desktop machine outward.
It is also not a review site in the sense of in-person evaluation. Everything here is researched from published specifications, material data and owner reports, and no page pretends otherwise.
The editorial bias, stated plainly
This site would rather tell you not to buy something. Several pages recommend keeping a stock part, skipping an upgrade, or outsourcing the job entirely, and one calculator exists mainly to tell some readers that buying a printer will never pay for itself. That is not modesty: advice that only ever points toward a purchase is not advice, and a recommendation is worth reading only from a source willing to make the opposite one.
Safety is treated as accuracy
The safety content here is not a liability exercise. Never lasering PVC, matching eyewear to wavelength, and treating uncured resin as a sensitiser are documented facts with immediate consequences, and they are written the same way as any other fact on the site. Where a machine cannot do a job safely, the page says so instead of publishing a setting.
Common questions
Why are 3D printing and laser cutting on the same site?
Because they share a bench, a room and an extraction system, and the people who own one frequently own both. They also solve opposite problems, since a printer builds three dimensional shapes slowly while a laser cuts flat material quickly, so owning both covers far more work than owning two of either. Writing them together means the ventilation and workshop safety advice is written once and written properly.
Why no CNC routers?
Because a router is a different machine with different hazards, different calculations and a different buyer, and covering it badly would help nobody. Desktop fabrication here means machines that sit on a bench and cut or build without throwing chips across a room. Router, table saw and dust collection work belongs on a site that treats it as the main subject.
Is this site for beginners or for print farms?
Both, deliberately, because the same person is often the second after being the first. The build ladders run from a first bench to a small farm, and the calculators scale with them: filament cost matters on print one, and cost per part across a bank of machines matters on print ten thousand. Every page says which reader it is for.
How often does the information change?
Material properties and physical relationships do not change at all, which is most of what is here. Prices change constantly and are drawn from live retailer data rather than typed in. Machine recommendations shift as models are superseded, which is why the guides are written around categories and capabilities rather than around a leaderboard of current models.